The moon rover of India’s Chandrayaan-3 on Thursday morning rolled out from the spacecraft to begin its exploration of the uncharted lunar surface, ISRO said on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
The country’s space agency said that the spacecraft made a historic landing on the South Pole of the moon last evening, making India the first country to achieve this feat.
“The Ch-3 Rover ramped down from the Lander and India took a walk on the moon. More updates soon,” Isro posted on X.
The first picture of the six-wheeled robotic vehicle Pragyan rolling out of Vikram has been shared by Pawan K Goenka, the chairman of Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre, a single-window, independent, nodal agency that functions as an autonomous agency in the Department of Space (DOS).
The Lander and the Rover with a mission life of one Lunar day (14 Earth days) have scientific payloads to carry out experiments on the lunar surface.
The Rover payloads are the LIBS or ‘Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope’ and the APXS or ‘Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer’
The LIBS will determine qualitative and quantitative elemental analysis and to derive the chemical Composition and infer mineralogical composition to further our understanding of Lunar-surface. The APXS will determine the elemental composition (Magnesium, Aluminium, Silicone, Potassium, Calcium Titanium and Iron) of the Lunar soil and rocks around the lunar landing site.
